Does this statistic highlight the failure of social media as a tool for marketing, social media marketers, or how poorly marketers are measuring success?

Personally, for my small business, I measure the success of my own (social media) marketing activities in terms of business leads and referrals. Metrics along the way help me to fine-tune my strategy.

TOOLS

I’ve been relying on Buffer, Bitly, and Twitonomy for automation; on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Analytics for metrics; and TwitterAudit to identify the percentage of fake Twitter followers. One of my favorite tools for monitoring and content curation is Google Alerts.

These tools work great if you don’t have to scale. They become laborious if you have a lot of data, as creating a report from many sources is a lot of work.

Hence, when I stumbled over eClincher, it got my attention quickly. It’s one of the few metrics tools that I pay for, as it aggregates and presents data in a way that enables business decision making.

(Note: MarketingXLerator is not getting compensated for highlighting any vendors in this blog series).

Natascha: Xavier, what can eClincher deliver that the tools I mention above cannot?

Xavier: The main benefit of eClincher is that it is a complete social media management tool. Our philosophy is that everything should be in one place, and this is evident in our consistent efforts to partner with amazing companies like Canva, Giphy and Feedly.

You mentioned a handful of tools that you are currently using to manage your social presence. eClincher should be able to replace all of those tools, allowing you to organize and manage everything in one place. This is great news for your productivity and your wallet.

A few specific features that differentiate eClincher from the tools you mentioned are:

Unified Social Inbox: The Inbox aggregates all of your actionable messages and notifications so that all you need to worry about is completing them.

Auto Post: With Auto Post you group your content into queues and then schedule the queues. This saves you time because you do not have to manually schedule each and every post. The best part is that the content in your queues is recycled, meaning you get more out of the content you share.

Natascha: How does eClincher compare with other paid tools like Hootsuite, Sysomos, SproutSocial, Sprinklr et al?

Xavier: All of these tools are fantastic, so we are in some great company. Our unique selling proposition is that our tool is a literal mix of all the best things from the tools you mentioned.

When I first started working at eClincher, one of my main jobs was social listening. I monitored specific keywords and engaged with people. After more than a year of doing this nearly everyday, as well as speaking with our existing customers, we were able to create an all-in-one solution that encompassed the needs of our users.

Natascha: For those who are not so familiar yet with social media metrics, can you explain how to set them and what expectations can be met?

Xavier: At eClincher we love social media analytics. In fact, our tool started as an analytics tool and evolved into a complete social media management tool.

When it comes to metrics, it is important to identify your key performance indicators (KPIs). These will be different for each business. KPIs are what you will track.

For example, you may want to measure how many mentions your brand receives weekly on Twitter. By identifying this as a KPI, you can analyze and optimize it.

It is important to note that your KPIs should align with your larger business goals. A lot of businesses track the number of followers they have, but do not stop to think why they do it. Do more followers mean more sales? Not always. It is important to start with your business goals and then align your KPIs accordingly.

Natascha: Can you briefly talk about some of your customers and what benefits they have derived from using your tool?

Xavier: I could talk about our customers all day. I may be biased, but we have some of the best customers in the world. We like to think of them as partners. Not a day goes by where we do not speak directly with customers to help make eClincher better for them.

A few benefits that seem to be universal for our customers are:

Ease-Of-Use: When we started creating eClincher, most of the tools on the market were too confusing. They were usable by highly skilled marketers, but what about the business owner or the stay at home mom with a rocking blog to promote?

Consolidation: As you alluded to earlier, most marketers currently use several different tools to manage their presence. A major benefit our customer have expressed about eClincher is it’s ability to replace some or all of the tools they were using.

Price: This goes hand in hand with consolidation. Since our customers now need only our tool, they are saving a lot of money. On top of that, we offer several different pricing plans to fit different needs and budget.

Natascha: In the age of Digital Transformation, is your tool solely focused on the online social media world or is there an offline component? Also, how do you tie in with the expanding realm of Big Data aggregation and analysis?

Xavier: eClincher is primarily focused on the online world, but we do plan to introduce some offline components as well. For example, we plan to add some basic customer relationship management (CRM) features to our tool, which could then be used offline to grow their business.

Big data is certainly a growing trend and one that will proliferate all industries sooner than later. The data that businesses collect is only as good as it is understandable. This is where eClincher steps in.

Though you could certainly find other data specific tools that could give you more information than you could ever consume, eClincher tries to make the data easily consumable and actionable. We have done a lot of the dirty work organizing and displaying the necessary information, so our users can just analyze it and act accordingly.

Natascha: How do companies find the content that keeps the social selling wheels spinning?

Xavier: I love this question because we just addressed this issue. Finding the right content is hard. On a daily basis nearly five million new blog posts are published, not to mention other forms of content. Simply put: it is impossible to keep up with all the new content being produced.

Luckily, there are tools that help automate this process. My favorite tool for this is feedly. We recently partnered with feedly to bring their content curation capabilities to eClincher. Now our users can enter in specific interests and feedly will create feeds full of relevant content.

If you are still searching the web manually to find all your content, give feedly a try. You will be amazed how much time and stress it will save you.

Natascha: Any thoughts on cyber security and brand reputation management? Can eClincher help?

Xavier:

I definitely think eClincher can help on both fronts. Security wise, our tool makes it easy to create multiple roles, which allows you to give access to some features, while protecting your private information.

Though some cyber attacks are intricate and hard to stop, many are a result of user error. Our Roles feature eliminates a lot of these loopholes, making your data extremely safe.

In regards to brand reputation management, eClincher has you covered. The Inbox feature makes it nearly impossible to miss an important notification or message, which helps you better understand how your brand is being perceived.

eClincher also has custom search feeds for social listening. These search feeds allow for quick access to everything that is being said about a specific keyword. I personally monitor a dozen or so search feeds daily to better understand our reputation, as well as our competitors reputations.

When it comes to social media, understand that it is ok to make a mistake, but it is not ok to not fix it.

Companies with the best brand reputation aren’t perfect, they are experts at fixing any mistakes they may have committed.

About Xavier Davis

Xavier is a Digital Marketing Specialist at eClincher, a social media management tool. When he isn’t crafting digital marketing campaigns, he can be found reading, writing and hiking. If you have any questions or would like to say hello, connect with Xavier on LinkedIn or Twitter.